it's like a home for anorgasmic people! a thread for anorgasmia and difficulty in getting off

but yeah, saying "we" in her tweet is kind of asking for it from a varied community. then again, it has to be phrased that way to take it away from the personal

crut otm

a lot of the responses to that tweet are nuts but she's the one who worded it the way she did, it's one thing to not experience pleasure there it's another to act like every single vagina-haver is faking it

xp yeah

i meant to recommend mary roach's BONK to anyone interested in sex research and/or historical sex and/or the ~mystery~surrounding climax. the audio book gets mighty tedious because the woman reading it sounds like terry gross, but the content was interesting enough to entertain me for nearly 14 hours of dull midwestern driving. there are moments when it veers into goofy/news of the weird shit, but the stuff about masters and johnson was good, among a bunch of other things.

i meant to recommend it earlier but did not want to search for this thread
yet here it is, so

maybe she should have used "many among us" instead of we but ehhhh who cares

i can't stand people who assume everyone is just like them; one of the most irritating traits imo

:)

"backlash" and "party leather" are a good post/dn combo.

anyway about that book -- her research is not partic deep or academic, but i think a lot of people who have trouble achieving in the "traditional" (scare quotes intentional) ways will find it gratifying (if not somewhat satisfying, hehehe)

btw the whole book is not focused on anorgasmia -- it's just part
it's mostly a lite historical look at scientific sex research

that's the same lady who did the "i look like lena dunham and bang hot guys" essay, right?

Yes. That's her.

I don't understand why people read her tweet as a universal statement? "Can't we all agree" is generally the lead-in for something outlandish and/or sarcastic, IME.

but she said something that wasn't, to her, outlandish or sarcastic and she spends many words explaining she meant it literally

didn't read as sarcastic at all

let me rephrase, the "can't we all agree" is sarcastic - whatever is said after that may be true for the person.

Milo OTM - I read it as her challopsing.

It's got me thinking about physical vs psychological enjoyment of sex and I hadn't really realized before how overwhelmingly my enjoyment of it is psychological. E.g., I get a TON more pleasure from giving head than getting. My mind wanders when I get a BJ, but giving can keep me engaged for a long time.

'the sexiest body part is the mind'

-- bob marley

marleyproof

i haven't found a better place to put this so i will put it here
i think i found it while searching for sex education materials? i can't remember. anyway, it's relevant to the interests of this thread.

ABSTRACT. Women report anorgasmia and other difficulties achieving orgasm. One approach to alleviating this problem is to teach women about the clitoris. This assumes that women lack information about the clitoris and that knowledge about the clitoris is correlated with orgasm. Using a non-random sample of 833 undergraduate students, our study investigates both assumptions. First, we test the amount of knowledge about the clitoris, the reported sources of this knowledge, and the correlation between citing a source and actual knowledge. Second, we measure the correlation between clitoral knowledge and orgasm in both masturbation and partnered sex. Among a sample of undergraduate students, the most frequently cited sources of clitoral knowledge (school and friends) were associated with the least amount of tested knowledge. The source most likely to correlate with clitoral knowledge (self-exploration) was among the most rarely cited. Despite this, respondents correctly answered, on average, three of the five clitoral knowledge measures. Knowledge correlated significantly with the frequency of women’s orgasm in masturbation but not partnered sex. Our results are discussed in light of gender inequality and a social construction of sexuality, endorsed by both men and women, that privileges men’s sexual pleasure over women’s, such that orgasm for women is pleasing, but ultimately incidental.

http://lisawadedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/wade-kremer-brown-2005-the-incidental-orgasm.pdf

I totally missed you posting that but I'm going to read it all right now.

Actually I came here to say that this TEDtalk (lol? idk) basically peeled my brain open. There are so many things that gave me shocks of recognition and I have some exploration to do I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa0RUmGTCYY

...as soon as someone becomes a project, as soon as I have to hold back and say only supportive things, as soon as I perceive that they need something from me, I absolutely cannot feel desire. I can imagine that I do in an alternate reality, but right there with the person I cannot. I just realized this lately on a 2nd or 3rd date w someone I was trying to be attracted to (which might not have happened anyway) but definitely was not going to happen when I started feeling like I had the power to hurt him. I wondered if this was inordinately selfish of me, but I feel a little more aligned with myself from that talk.

i dunno if i wanna watch a tedtalk right now but what you say rings big bells - i think as much as anything what i desire is somebody else's desire, some kind of equality that's v. hard to reach with certain kinds of personal damage?

She does set out trauma as an opposite of desire, so you might find some connections made there, but as you like.

For a long time it has seemed like the only thing that did turn me on was the desire of others, that I could substitute their desire for my own? But that might, it seems obvious in retrospect, be a dead end for personal growth...and be related to why I dissociate from what's happening so much.

I started saying a long time ago that if I was going to have sex I at least wanted to be there for it, and not somewhere else or floating around the ceiling watching it or whatever. Actually achieving that has not really...happened.

Partly because I go a year at a time without meeting anyone I want to date (who wants to date me) at all, so it's an extremely slow process. I say this at about the 11-month mark, which is why I almost put this whole series of posts in the droughts thread.

first 5 minutes of that vid are painfully relevant. want to read her work now.

xp that sense of time being against us does so much to undermine our wiser instincts sometimes i think

"a glimpse of all our futures"

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex

A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.

I'm taking notes on the side about my own thoughts on the matter, I feel like a bunch of difft things lately have led up to me making a big jump in understanding some truths today. But in relation to the article about young people in Japan, I think...when you start realizing that nothing except equality is acceptable, it may be the case that everything suddenly becomes like 100x more difficult because everything you do is swimming upstream against the status quo. That amount of work is not always/often? going to be worth whatever the perceived benefits are.

Also just to say it again, human needs w/r/t sex and intimacy are amazingly varied, I grok that more and more. The "new normal" can be...ANYTHING.

People have introduced me lately to this guy Jay Smooth who has inspections of racism on youtube, and my favorite part is the "personal hygiene" approach to not being racist in which he compares it to brushing your teeth--upkeep, something you have to do every day or you lose the benefits of the act. So when you slip up and do or say something kinda racist, you're not doomed, you're not necessarily a bad person or irredeemable from some terrible hell, you just forgot to brush your teeth and you should do that before you talk to anyone else.

carl agatha commented once on what a huge amount of work it is to be in a ltr/marriage in which both ppl are committed to nullifying patriarchy and its effects on them, and I've been trying to fully grasp that idea ever since she said it, and I think I just understood some part of that.

But now we're really into a different thread entirely.

two key quotes that jumped out at me from that lecture:

"In this paradox between love and desire, what seems to be so puzzling is that the very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients which stifle desire.
Because desire comes with a host of feelings: jealousy, possessiveness, aggression, power, dominance, naughtiness, mischief. Basically most of us will be turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day... if everybody was fantasizing on a bed of roses, we wouldn't be having such interesting talks about this. We think love comes with selflessness and in fact, desire comes with a certain amount of selfishness, in the best sense of the word."

"Erotic couples understand that passion waxes and wanes like the moon: it has intermittent eclipses. But what they know is how to resurrect it because they have demystified one big myth: the myth of spontaneity. They understood that whatever is going to just happen in a long-term relationship already has. Committed sex is premeditated sex; it's willful, it's intentional, it's focused and present."

(jay smooth is an occassional poster here btw)

wait really

he's hungry4ass isn't he, i knew it

haha well more of an old poster really. i remember he replied to me here 90s/Lo-Fi Revivalism

Well if he reads this we totally namedropped him and his critique in our stoop talk yesterday.

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/doing-it-wrong

http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm458734.htm